The path snaked through the dark brush like a river cutting earth. She tried to remember the pollero’s instructions, right—no, left—a highway? Lights ahead cast shadows over the ground like prison bars, and Ana could feel a false safety beckoning: Crawl into the light. How long since she’d slept a full night? How long since she’d—?

The adrenaline rush faded, only exhaustion in its wake, she couldn’t even finish a thought. Up ahead she heard the rush of a single car.

The Amtrak train dropped her in Hialeah after three days and who knew how many transfers. Of all the train terminals she had passed through, this one struck her as saddest of all. A convergence point for south and west, tired bodies, people who couldn’t afford plane tickets or had accrued too many DUIs to drive down. A man with a long red beard hoisted a duffel emblazoned with a Confederate flag onto his shoulder. A woman dragged three crying children who clung to her legs.

Ana emerged blinking into the violent sunlight. A fading, sun-bleached mural on one wall of the train station depicted the Miami she’d harbored in dreams, all swaying palm trees and impossibly blue sky, sky that bled into ocean until you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. A metal cage covered half the mural and protected the air conditioner inside from theft. Beyond the train station, Ana could make out factory plumes and warehouses intersected by highway and the Miami-Dade Metrorail.

She’d done her research and knew she could take the Metrorail to Kendall and from there a bus to her old complex. She had the money all counted out in another ziplock in her backpack. She walked to the Hialeah station, passing boarded-up business fronts, check-cashing stores, pawnshops. Comforting, the Salvadoran pupusa spot, tucked between two abandoned buildings beneath an overpass. She couldn’t see inside, because someone had painted a countryside landscape complete with a horse carriage over the glass. Flyers for various performers and club nights were tacked over rolling hills. But she could smell the masa, the refried beans, childhood.

On the Metrorail, she sat between high schoolers making their way home from school, boisterous and happy and ignoring her, and downtown workers in suits reading books or staring blankly. Ana had taken improvised sink baths in terminal bathrooms, but she knew she looked a little wild. Sticky, salty. Her stomach rumbled.

Miami roared into a blur below—used-car lots, sprawling malls, pastel-colored condo complexes with pools and tennis courts, squat houses with metal bars, front yards strewn with broken appliances, corroding playgrounds. In the horizon, so many cranes rose into the sky like beanstalks, half-finished high-rises in their jaws. When night descended, the whole city lit up in purple and blue and white, an explosion of color.